Hani Abu Komail, 42, married with two children in Gaza City

I live in the centre of where they bombed at the beginning. Behind me is a police compound which they bombed and in front of me is the presidential palace which they also bombed. I was living on the seventh floor of my building but we moved downstairs to my brother's house on the first floor in the same building.

Every day we follow the same routine. We try to sleep from 6pm to 6am because there is no electricity. When we sleep we turn the radio up to cover the noise of the drones flying overhead and the bombs. Every day we go out looking for water, food and bread. I'm always buying batteries for the radio. We haven't had electricity for five days and fuel is low so we turn the generator on for two hours a day to charge up our mobile phones and lights.

It's really scary, it's unbelievable. They aren't going after one faction, they're targeting all Palestinians. We have to reach a ceasefire and they have to open the crossings. We've been suffering for two years, isn't that enough? We can't survive for long like this.

Sammy Abu Salem, producer with Ramattan news agency, married with one child

We left our house in Jabaliya refugee camp and moved to my mother-in-law's house three days ago. But now my mother-in-law's house is not so safe. It's in the middle of Gaza and the Israeli tanks have entered there. I have been cut off from my family and I am now living in the office in Gaza City. There's another 15 people working and living here. We sleep in shifts of two to five hours. Everywhere we feel death is waiting in every corner, in every street.

We have lost our feeling of security. We expect a bomb to hit any time. If Egypt opened the crossing at Rafah hundreds of thousands would leave. They are scared.

In the hospitals it's chaos. I saw one woman crying, going from one bed to another. She didn't know if her son was dead or alive, he just disappeared and there are a lot of people like this. Everyone is looking for their relatives to kiss them goodbye.

A relative of a victim at the Al-Shifa hospital. Photograph: Abid Katib/Getty Images

Atef Abu Se'ef, writer living in Gaza City, married with three children

Living in Gaza is risky and dangerous and you don't feel safe. You don't think about tomorrow because you don't know if it will come or not. You live minute to minute. This is how it was when I was a teenager in the first intifada. I couldn't think of tomorrow because tomorrow the army might impose a curfew. In the camp they would impose curfews sometimes for months. Tomorrow was unthinkable, so often I wouldn't do my homework. You are preoccupied with the little details.

I am a father and we have a shortage of food, bread and milk and at the same time you need to worry about your larger family: your father, your brothers who live in the refugee camp where there's shelling. I'm trying to find my sister. She moved from her place in Beit Lahiya where they invaded. I still don't know where she is.

For the past 10 days I haven't been able to check my emails. I know it's absurd. People are dying and trying to survive but this is my connection to the outside world. We don't know what's going on. I have been cut off from the world yet I am living in the news.

Elena Qleibo, Oxfam programme manager in Gaza. She has lived and worked in Gaza and the West Bank for 20 years

Fifteen minutes ago Israeli helicopters dropped leaflets saying we should move to the centre of the city as they are going to start bombing the edge. They said they don't want to create an inconvenience. That's a joke after the bombardment we have had in the last week.

There's been no electricity for the past three days. We are much better off than many people: we have a generator and a well and we still have fuel. There are people near us who haven't had water for a week. People are going around trying to buy generators and find fuel to pump water.

I've been speaking to people in the refugee camps inside Gaza where the fighting has been heaviest and they are catatonic. They're paralysed. They don't know what's happening to them and are just sitting waiting to see what's going to happen. It's all been very sudden and because it's so massive everybody is very shocked. Children are having a lot of problems - they are crying and wetting the bed and not sleeping. People in the outside world might think this is normal for Gaza, but it's not. People here never thought Israel would launch such a bloody attack.

Mohamed Marwan, married with four children in Gaza City

I moved from Beit Hanoun just before the ceasefire. I had lost too many days at work because of all the Israeli incursions and bombardments of that area. I couldn't protect my children so I decided to find a safer place in Gaza City near my work and I moved away from my mother and my brothers.

Now homes are being shelled, people are dying, people are burned and there are bodies that can't be moved from the rubble. Your thinking, your concentration is shattered. You are afraid, your wife is crying, your children are screaming.

I live in a small apartment, there are six of us and another six relatives have managed to leave Beit Hanoun to come and stay with us. We live in a six-storey building and most of my neighbours have relatives staying with them. We've been out of gas for three days, we have no kerosene for the stove, we've had no electricity for six days and we're running out of drinking water. Sometimes you can't stand the smell of the toilet because of the lack of water. We eat cold food from the can. If you go out and are lucky enough to find food, it's three or four times more expensive.

Right now I'm listening to bombardment in an area where my sister lives. She sent me a text to say her brother-in-law is dead and another is injured. Her sister-in-law, a widow with a son in an Israeli prison, has moved in with her.

If you go out in the early morning you see many people standing to get their share of bread from the bakeries. Sometimes fights break out because of the shortages. Life is miserable.